


Everything In Circles

by kittydesade



Category: Alphas
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-21
Updated: 2011-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-27 15:45:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/297461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittydesade/pseuds/kittydesade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Dr. Rosen first met Nina Theroux she was barely an adult, and in desperate need of a certain kind of help. When Dr. Rosen first lost Marcus Ayers, she found herself in a position to return the favor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everything In Circles

**Author's Note:**

  * For [blue_lantern](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blue_lantern/gifts).



Emergency sessions weren't unheard of in his line of work. True, some doctors and counselors were called in to so many of them that they made time in their schedule specifically in case of emergency, and he wasn't one of them, but it wasn't unheard of. Still, he felt oddly ill-equipped to deal with this one.

Of all the psychiatrists in the city, there were three at his clearance level. One of them had a full caseload dealing with the effects on the agents and certain members of the civilian population of this new surge of Alpha-class persons in the population. One was getting ready to transfer to the Binghamton facility. And one was him. He had freed up his schedule to deal with this, blocked out some time to discuss a new unit made up solely of Alphas to deal with the Alpha threat. He had even drawn up a list of Alpha abilities or other relevant skill sets that would be useful, but now that it came time to discuss a personal issue with one of the candidates, he felt unqualified. Not up to the task.

Imposter syndrome, he labeled it, when he caught himself wondering what in his experience and training made him think he could do this. No, he had studied both the physical workings and the current and historical schools of thought on the intricacies of the human mind, and he had many, many years of experience applying that knowledge to real world problems. He could do this.

Dr. Lee Rosen set his pen down firmly on the table and turned his attention from fidgeting at his desk to looking over the file of the young woman who had been brought to him.

Her name was Nina, and she believed she had killed her lover.

* * *

Rosen balanced on the very fine line between giving Nina enough time to get acclimatized to her surroundings and letting her stew in her own feelings and insecurities. It was, at least, a familiar tightrope to walk. In this case he erred on the side of not enough time to get used to her surroundings, since he was a part of what she would have to get used to and he suspected her of suicidal ideation already.

"Nina," he called her to attention, after her gaze wandered out the window of his office. "Is there anywhere you would like to begin?"

"Not really. No." Her foot bounced. She sat in a manner that implied poise but her inability to keep still betrayed her nerves. Her fingers moved back and forth on the sofa, and she seemed to be actively resisting the urge to fidget with her hands with something.

"Why don't you tell me what you think brought you here? In your own words," of course. Always in their own words, which either cued the client to repeat what he or she had been told by other persons of authority or forced them to think about what problems they had, the issues that brought them to his office.

In Nina's case it seemed to be repeating what authority figures had told her. "I was told to make an appointment with you as the officer in charge of the death investigation was concerned that I might have some negative and lasting impact from..." She didn't even bother to vary her tone or otherwise conceal the fact that she was repeating their words verbatim. Or nearly verbatim.

"I asked for your own words," he pointed out. "What do you think brought you here?"

She fidgeted a little more, looked out of the window instead of at him. She seemed to have difficulty looking directly at him. "I killed my boyfriend."

"Your file..." he made a show of opening and looking at her file, to contrast with what he might say outside of it. He'd already read well enough to know most of the details. "Your file says your boyfriend committed suicide."

"Yeah, I know." Still looking out the window, but this time the fidgeting stopped. Her face slackened somewhat and her hands stilled; she was retreating into herself.

Rosen drew her attention back to him by standing, coming around and perching against the edge of the desk. "So why do you say you killed him?"

Nina shrugged. "I told him to do it." Not that she thought he would believe that made her culpable, he knew. Alpha powers that did not immediately affect the physical environment tended to be the more difficult ones both to prove and for the Alpha to accept. All things being equal, he would rather treat her ability as given until proven otherwise than the reverse, which could do more damage.

"Did you know, when you said it, that he would?"

Now he did have her attention. No one had ever asked her that, he suspected; everyone else either assumed she had pushed him directly or tried to soothe her with the platitude that just because she had said it, he still had the free will to obey or not as he chose. If she had an Alpha ability that subsumed the will of another person, possible in a number of different ways, that wasn't always so clear.

"I..." she started, then stopped. Closed her mouth and frowned, trying to concentrate, but the more those lines of concentration drew her brows down the more her mouth wobbled, eyes going bright and glittery. He plucked a couple tissues from the box on his desk and handed them to her just before the first sniffle started.

Given no expectations to react to, to conform herself to, she seemed to lose the focus of her grief. It would be easier dealing with the investigators, the agents who came to talk to her and try and feel out if she was an Alpha, they were looking for something. They had a specific goal in mind. Rosen tried to keep his mind open so that goals could wander freely as the circumstances allowed, he felt it was easier that way.

Easier for everyone except Nina, at least. He didn't prompt her and she kept searching for words, crumpling the tissue in her hand after a couple of swipes only to have to uncrumple it again when more tears or sniffles flowed. Eventually he just passed her the box. He wondered if this was the first time she had cried over the young man's death. If crying was her way of coping with death.

"There is a difference..." he said, when her crying slowed enough to hear him. "Both in the legal system and that we as human beings tend to define... between action and culpability. Between the processes of cause and effect, and the limitations of our ability to predict what happens as a result of our actions..." and most of this was technical, details to keep her focused on his voice while he brought her out of her emotional surge. Coupled with words that would hopefully help if she did happen to be able to hear him.

"Whether or not you were the cause of your friend's death, that does not mean you take on the... the full burden of it." It was as close as he could come to absolving her of responsibility. She would know, for years, that her actions had caused a man's death.

"You obviously don't think I'm crazy," she snuffled into a tissue, glaring at him over her hands and through reddened eyes. "You believe I told him to jump, and that made him jump..."

"I believe that you know..." he chose his words slowly and carefully, picking each one so as not to alienate her. "More clearly now what your ... ability. Is capable of than you did then. I believe that if you had known you could cause him to do that, that you wouldn't have said what you did."

Whatever that had been. Nina didn't know what to do with that, and while Rosen brought around the small wastebasket for her pile of tissues she frowned at him, watchful, wary.

"Nina... to start off, yes. I do believe you have the ability to compel people by spoken command. With your voice or by some other way, I do believe you can do this. I also believe that you didn't mean for him to die. What I am therefore going to do, if you think you can agree with this, is to treat you as I would any other person who has caused another person's death by means of a tool or a device greater than their control, for instance, someone who has accidentally struck another person with their car."

Nina dropped her eyes to the carpet. But for the first time since she'd sat down in his office, she looked present and ready to engage him in conversation and in the therapy. "You're saying my... ability. Is like a car."

"I'm saying exactly that. A car that maybe you don't know how to drive very well yet, and that lack of knowing and skill has resulted in a tragedy. But that puts no blame on you." She looked sharply up at him again. "Would you blame a sixteen year old driver for hitting a pedestrian out of a lack of experience and the slower reaction time of a teenager? You were, if I'm not mistaken, a teenaged driver yourself, once. You remember what that's like."

Another slow nod. "I remember... I remember being terrified behind the wheel the whole time," she even laughed, a short and harsh sound, but it was still a laugh. Her voice was steadier. Small progress.

Rosen gave her a small smile in return, with the detached affection of a professional listener. "Tragedies happen, sometimes, because of a confluence of unfortunate events. Not through any intentional malice on anyone's part, and not through any inherent fault of the person or persons involved. You are not a murderer, and hardly a monster. What you are is someone who has been through a terrible tragedy. And it seems like, maybe, you need a little help coming out of that."

Nina nodded, back to fidgeting and lacing her fingers together only to pull them apart and tap them over her knees. It was as promising a beginning as he could expect.

* * *

"You have to focus, Nina, and choose your words carefully."

Nina stepped away from him and rubbed her forehead with the carefully manicured fingers of one hand. Her personal grooming habits had returned to their previous fastidious detail, or so he assumed, a good sign that she was getting better. And so he pushed her accordingly.

"I am focusing," she muttered to the space between her mouth and her hand; he heard her anyway.

"The commands you're giving to Agent Matheson are safe. We designed them to be safe, you know that, you were a part of deciding which ones you would give."

"I know!"

Rosen sighed. "All right. We'll take a five minute break."

He hadn't anticipated this. Then again, he hadn't anticipated needing the patience to be a teacher as well as a counselor, and he hadn't expected that the patience would be of such a different nature. He went back into his office and reached for his water bottle, thinking.

"Sorry." Nina leaned in his doorway, arms folded over her chest in a way that was too tense to be as casual as her posture suggested she wanted him to interpret. "I'm sorry."

"It's all right, Nina." he waved it away. "Some resistance was to be expected. You've had a tough time with your ability to begin with, it will make you subconsciously resist using your Alpha ability again."

Her half-smile was tight, but it did touch her eyes. "Is this another one of your post-traumatic stress side-effect speeches?"

He shook his head, another soft chuckle and drink of water. "God, I hope not. I'm running out of those, they might lose their effectiveness." He moved some papers around on his desk, neatening stacks, putting things back into folders both for the sake of being able to find them again and for something to do with his hands. When he looked up again she was staring at him curiously.

"Could that really happen?"

Erk. He grimaced, an exaggerated expression because it wasn't much of a concern but definitely a look along those lines. "It's possible? Sometimes the more we're told a thing the more we believe it, other times the more we hear it, the less it seems true and the more it seems ... it's just words for form's sake." Shrug. "Unfortunately it's usually the bad things that we hear repeated that we believe most readily."

"Get called a manipulative bitch often enough, you start to become one. Well, I guess that's not too hard to understand." She wasn't talking to him, but to the air between them. One hand rubbing along her upper arm. It wasn't that cold in the office.

"Nina... have you been talking to the other agents about your Alpha ability? What we've been doing here?"

She came in further to the room, looking over her shoulder at first. "I haven't... should I not be doing that? I was just..."

He raised a hand as he overlapped her speaking. "No, no, that's fine, it's all right, it's just... some of the agents have a tough time. Dealing with Alphas." To say the least of it. He wondered, now, if that might not be part of her difficulty controlling her abilities. If so, it was a vicious cycle. She couldn't develop the focus she needed while she was afraid and mistrustful of her ability, which would lead to it spontaneously erupting at the worst of times. Which would potentially lead to more casualties, which would in turn cause more distrust in the agents, et cetera, et cetera. "I'll talk to them. Make sure they understand that you're doing your best."

Nina nodded, though she knew something was going on that he wasn't telling her. She was a bright young woman, and he wasn't doing his best job of concealing his intentions.

"I'm, um." Her fingers curled into the sleeve of her blouse. "I'm sorry if I've caused any ..."

"It's all right, Nina. You're fine. You're not doing anything wrong."

Oh, but he did look forward to the day when he wouldn't have to reassure anyone of that. When he could stop trying to make people feel better because they felt guilty for being who and what they were. Until that rapturous day, however, he would have to settle for stopping those trains of thought on the tracks as best he could.

* * *

He straightened up his desk for the third or fourth time, putting the files away. Then putting them in his briefcase; he could take them home and work on them there for a couple of days. Clear his schedule. He would have to remember to call in and get his schedule cleared for a couple of days so he could go over the files, figure out where he went wrong.

"Dr. Rosen?" Not so much a question, Nina announced her presence by rapping on the door-frame. It took him a second to remember why she was there in the first place.

"Yes... I'm sorry, Nina, I'll have to re-schedule our session this week, something's come up..."

"I know, I heard. Marcus Ayers."

"Ah."

The air felt too chilly, or maybe that was just his hands. Too cold. He stuck them in his pockets to keep them warm and when he looked up again Nina was further into the room. "You feel guilty because he got shipped off to Binghamton. Because you weren't able to help him understand that ... that his power is unique. That we don't see the world that way."

His eyebrows lifted, he felt himself smiling in what had once been called his smug superior smile. Not that he thought it was, but what concerned him more was what Nina thought he was feeling. "Are you trying my own tactics against me?" It was meant to be humorous.

"But your tactics work, don't they? Name the problem. Give it a shape, take some of the power of the unknown away from it. You feel like it's your fault that you weren't able to get through to him completely and quickly enough to help him before our government handlers ..."

Now that did make him smile, and for real.

"... put him away for being a threat, what?"

"You said 'our' government handlers. Our handlers."

Now she smiled back. "Well, that's what they are, aren't they?"

For a moment, it seemed the warmth of camaraderie was almost enough to take the chill away.

"That's what they are, yes. And I am responsible. He's a young man who can see the connection in everything around him, from the tiniest slip on a sidewalk, dropping a coin, he can see the connection from that to the cabinet door that he hits his head on fifteen minutes later and he doesn't understand that no one else can, either. And I was never able to explain ..."

She closed in, rested her hand on his shoulder and he closed his mouth to keep from continuing whatever it was he was doing, babbling, he thought. Strange, he never babbled. Rambled, sometimes, maybe, but not like this.

"You liked him. I liked him too, he was... he could be sweet. And that way of looking at the world, you did help him with that. I talked to him too, remember?"

He nodded, he remembered.

"So you think about that. It's not your fault the people in charge of the jackboots and the big guns got impatient. You were helping him. You were, I promise."

Rosen didn't know what to make of this sudden new, assertive, kind? No, she had always been kind in her own way, but this was different. More controlled, more deliberate in her treatment of him. Also using his own tricks and tactics against him, which he did appreciate. "Thank you, Nina. That does help."

"Good." She smiled. "So, we still on for our session? I mean, you're the one who always says that routines help, routines keep us on track, gives us something to hold onto even if the rest of the world..."

"I said that?" He snorted, pushed his glasses up a bit as he went around to pull out two chairs for them. "Must have been out of my mind."


End file.
